Sejal Shah & Valerie Boyd
first corresponded in 2016, after an essay by Shah appeared in Brevity’s special issue on race, racism, and racialization. Boyd, then coeditor of the Crux series in literary nonfiction at the University of Georgia Press, wrote to ask if Shah had a manuscript in progress. Since then, the two women, who’d previously only known each other on social media, have become friendly collaborators. Boyd edited Shah’s collection of essays, This Is One Way to Dance, for the UGA Press Crux series and has welcomed Shah as a guest at the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction that she directs at the university.
In this lively conversation, which took place via Zoom in June 2021 and has been condensed and edited for clarity, they shared the books that made them want to write, discussed the differences between editors of color and white editors, and considered the importance of anthologies and key texts in writers’ lives, as well as the ways in which the absence of writers of color from these anthologies adds to their historic erasure.
VALERIE BOYD is the author of the critically acclaimed Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston and editor of the forthcoming Gathering Blossoms Under Fire: The Journals of Alice Walker (Simon & Schuster, April 2022) and Bigger Than Bravery: Black Writers on the Year That Changed the World (Lookout Books, Fall 2022). She is an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia, where she founded and directs the low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction. Her articles, essays, and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Bon Appétit, the Oxford American, Essence, and Atlanta magazine, among other publications. She is the senior consulting editor for the Bitter Southerner and an editor at large at UGA Press.
SEJAL SHAH is a prose writer and poet whose writing crosses genres and disciplines. She is the author of This Is One Way to Dance: Essays (University of Georgia Press, 2020), named an NPR Best Book of 2020 and a finalist for the 2021 CLMP Firecracker Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her essays, short stories, and poems have appeared in Brevity, the Guardian, Guernica, Conjunctions, Kenyon Review Online, Longreads, and Poets & Writers, and in anthologies including Ghazals for Foley and Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America. The recipient of a 2018 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in fiction, she recently completed a story collection and is working on new writing about mental health. She lives in Rochester, New York; find her on Twitter and Instagram @sejalshahwrites.
SEJAL SHAH: How do you trace your lineage as a nonfiction writer?
I’m devoted to nonfiction—but I’ve also been influenced by fiction writers. In high school, I had an excellent AP English teacher, a Black woman named Ora Cosby Thomas. Her class was this immersive experience in American literature. Through her, I read Alice Walker, I read James Baldwin, I read Ann Petry. This is where my lineage begins—and so that’s
